BLACK ROCK ARTS X THE FILM-MAKERS’ COOPERATIVE
October 2, 2025 at 7PM
Black Rock Arts is excited to announce a unique collaboration with The Film-Maker's Cooperative / New American Cinema Group of New York City.
Please join us in the gallery Thursday, October 2, at 7PM, for a very special program of experimental short films drawn from FMC / NACG's extensive archive of independent and avant-garde cinema.
Conceived as a complement to the gallery’s current exhibition, Water, Water, Everywhere, the evening’s program opens with two films by Ann Deborah Levy, Water Falls New York (2019) and Watercolors (2007), followed by Margaret Rorison’s Gowanus Haze (2012). These works will be presented in digital video. The second half of the program features two rarely-seen historic works in 16mm film: Sky Blue Water Light Sign (1972) by J.J.Murphy and Stream Rapids Falls (1978) by Dave Gearey.
These films are true gems of experimental film spanning five decades. The program was curated by Jason Duval, co-founder of Black Rock Arts, and Matt McKinzie, Artistic Director of The Film-Maker's Cooperative.
This screening is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:45 and the program begins promptly at 7:00. The total program run time is just under 70 minutes.
Selected film stills, program notes and filmmaker bios are below. For more information, please contact the gallery at (347) 469-0646 or info@blackrockarts.biz.
Still from Water Falls New York City, 2019, by Ann Deborah Levy. Digital, color, sound, 12 minutes
Still from Water Falls New York City
Water falling, flying, and flowing from New York City fountains echoes the moods and energy of the City. Circling back on a summer’s day to one West Village fountain, the camera catches glimpses of neighborhood life through the prism of the water — a painterly symphony, augmented by sounds of people, traffic, and the constant water. — Ann Deborah Levy
Still from Watercolors, 2007, by Ann Deborah Levy. 16mm transferred to digital, color and black & white, silent, 13 minutes
Still from Watercolors
Colors, patterns, and images, reflected on the surface of a pond, mirror changes in seasons and weather over the course of a year to create this painting in motion. — Ann Deborah Levy
Ann Deborah Levy explores how landscapes and locations are perceived by the human eye and mediated by the camera, weather conditions, and other visual phenomena, and questions how reality is observed, recorded, imagined, or remembered. Her films have screened in alternative venues including Millennium Filmworks, Brooklyn; UnionDocs, Brooklyn; Anthology Film Archives, New York City; The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, New York City; Moving Image Art, Pasadena; Cellular Cinema, Minneapolis; and in festivals across the United States and abroad. Levy has been active in film preservation since 2013. She is a former Co-Chair and active member of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television and has programmed numerous preservation screening series internationally. In November Levy’s films will be the subject of a retrospective screening at The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
Still from Gowanus Haze, 2012, by Margaret Rorison. 16mm transferred to digital, black & white, sound, 6 minutes
Still from Gowanus Haze
Margaret Rorison’s short film explores landscape as a catalyst for memory and reflection. She captures the environs of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, once a productive port and industrial compound, today a gentrified Superfund site. The film’s soundtrack incorporates recordings of Rorison’s grandfather recalling his own memories of New York City, and additional audio from a lumberyard, of the wind in Northern Vermont, and the sound of a projector projecting the film itself.
Rorison is a filmmaker, projectionist, and curator who works to support and preserve contemporary filmmakers and film culture. She is the in-house filmmaker at The Baltimore Museum of Art and occasionally projects 16mm and 35mm films for The National Gallery of Art Film Programs in Washington D.C. From 2012-2022, Rorison directed Sight Unseen, an experimental film series that brought over 50 notable filmmakers, curators, and artists to Baltimore to present their work, forming various partnerships with Baltimore-based organizations and institutions. Her own filmmaking is concerned with notions of portraiture, family, memory, and the precarity and beauty of natural ecosystems. Rorison has screened her work at Anthology Film Archives, Microscope Gallery, The Museum of The Moving Image, The National Gallery of Art, and The Walker Art Center; and in festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Open City Documentary Film Festival, & Mono No Aware Cinema Arts Festival, among many others.
Still from Sky Blue Water Light Sign, 1972, by J.J. Murphy. 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes
Still from Sky Blue Water Light Sign
SKY BLUE WATER LIGHT SIGN is best seen in total innocence. My guess is that if one knows what he or she is looking at before seeing this little film, half of its excitement and a good deal of its meaning disappear… Seen in total innocence…[this film] is a wonder. With Larry Gottheim's BLUES and Hollis Frampton's LEMON (FOR ROBERT HUNT), it is one of the happiest, most uplifting short films I've ever seen. — Scott MacDonald, Idiolects
J.J. Murphy is a renowned filmmaker, scholar and curator. His films have screened at showcases, film festivals, and in museums worldwide, including MoMA New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, The Museum of the Moving Image, The National Gallery of Art, The Austrian Film Museum, The Barbican Film Centre and Centre Georges Pompidou. Murphy is the author of four major books on film, numerous scholarly and critical articles on cinema arts, served on the editorial board of the Journal of Screenwriting, and for nearly four decades was professor of film production and film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2024 he founded JJ Murphy Gallery with the intent to add a distinct curatorial voice to the discourse of the New York City art scene.
Still from Stream Rapids Falls, 1978, by Dave Gearey. 16mm, black & white, silent, 29 minutes
Still from Stream Rapids Falls
Not going to the woods and sitting by a stream, but coming into the dark of Cinema for meditating on nature. Not meditating on Mother Nature and her parts, but on Mother Cinema and her forms. — Dave Gearey
A concerto for the kind of water which is so ordinary that normally one forgets to look at it and which is here filmed with astonishing attention. — Pierre Job, Liberation Magazine (Paris)
Dave Gearey “...is a poet with a camera and his touch is everywhere, in every frame, and he touches us with a strong feeling for nature…He's got a poetic visual style and it has something to do with the way he sees and selects. His textures, pans, cuts and angles are beautifully orchestrated. He crops and concentrates on one thing and allows the film to emerge visually, to take its own shape and texture. It explains more with less ... that is the power of abstraction. All of his films contained these qualities." — Leonard Horowitz, The Soho Weekly News
About The Film-Makers’ Cooperative:
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative / New American Cinema Group is the oldest non-profit organization devoted to the collection, preservation, and distribution of experimental film and media art in New York City. The organization was founded in 1961 as a collaboration between 22 NYC artists, among them Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Ken and Flo Jacobs, Andy Warhol and Jack Smith, to support filmmakers and artists outside of the mainstream Hollywood film industry. FMC is a member-run organization that distributes and exhibits work from its ever-growing collection of nearly 6,000 films, videos, and media artworks by approximately 2,000 artists. Additionally, FMC actively supports new work from contemporary makers through grant and production assistance.
The Film-Makers' Cooperative offers a diverse exhibition and workshop program curated by an array of in-house and outside experts, curators, writers, artists, and scholars. FMC partners on programming with, and lends films to, a global network of film and art institutions including MoMA, MoMI, The Public Art Fund, Independent Art Fair, Film at Lincoln Center, Maysles Documentary Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Light Industry, Millennium Film Workshop, Spectacle Theater, and Anthology Film Archives, among other venues. The organization also has a long history of publishing newsletters, periodicals, and books that advocate, historicize, and examine the field of moving image art.
Public accessibility and non-exclusivity have always been the core of their educational mission, as they work to bring both the history and the future of experimental cinema to audiences in New York and around the world. Anyone may submit their work to be distributed by FMC, and all members of the organization retain full, non-exclusive ownership of their work.
FMC activities are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and also by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.